A Very Expensive Poison (24 page)

Soon afterwards, the threats from Moscow began. In 2011–12 Perepilichnyy told his Hermitage contacts that his situation was looking dangerous. ‘He tried to be cautious. He was a bit fatalistic,’ the source – who doesn’t want to be named – said. Perepilichnyy’s name turned up on a hit list recovered from a group of Chechen assassins
arrested in France. The gang had a pretty accurate dossier on Perepilichnyy’s whereabouts in the UK, though some details were out of date.

More warnings followed. Perepilichnyy met in Geneva with someone who presented himself as an informal representative of Russia’s interior ministry. The representative passed on a message: that Perepilichnyy was to make a public statement saying that the wire transfers to Stepanov’s offshore accounts were completely legitimate. Failure to do so would result in the authorities in Moscow opening a money-laundering case against him.

In May 2012, Perepilichnyy held talks with Stepanov’s lawyer, Andrei Pavlov. Pavlov was on his way back to Russia; the venue was a café on the upper floor of London Heathrow Airport terminal five. It’s unclear what they discussed – though Pavlov claims that Perepilichnyy said he wanted a reconciliation with the Stepanovs and other unhappy former customers in Russia.

As for Stepanov himself, he denies wrongdoing. In a public letter in 2011, he said that he and Olga were divorced. He claims that the value of his designer mansion near Rublyovka – Moscow’s most exclusive district – has been overstated. Of Perepilichnyy, he said: ‘This man owes me a lot of money. As a matter of fact not only to me but to scores of other creditors. He cheated me by pocketing my money and assets.’

On 5 November 2012, Perepilichnyy held his last meeting with the team from Hermitage. ‘He was casually dressed. The photos of him are accurate, but the final time I saw him he was looking a bit skinnier,’ the source
said. Like Litvinenko in Spain, Perepilichnyy had agreed to testify in a forthcoming trial in Switzerland into the $230 million fraud, where he would be the star prosecution witness.

Next, Perepilichnyy took the Eurostar to Paris. He spent three or four days there. Some sources suggest Ukrainian women were involved. Perepilichnyy appears to have worried about his security. He booked into three different hotels: the five-star George V, the Bristol, and a three-star guesthouse. He spent €1,200 in a Prada shop.

He returned by train to London. Back at home, his wife cooked him some sorrel soup. He told her he was feeling somewhat groggy. He decided to run this feeling off. And then he collapsed.

Detectives in Surrey were slow to grasp Perepilichnyy’s story – his links with shadowy figures in Moscow, his name on a Russian death-list, the emissaries and warnings. Instead, they treated his death as routine. There was, after all, no proof that this was murder. Nor were there any obvious suspects. Their assumption, it appears, was that Perepilichnyy’s death was due to cardiac arrest.

For those who knew FSB methods, however, the case looked deeply suspicious.

Before Litvinenko’s death, it might have seemed improbable verging on incredible that Russian assassins might murder someone on the streets of London. After Litvinenko, these doubts disappeared. Such murders had happened and were happening. The question for police was: was this one of them?

To Browder, the Perepilichnyy case looked like Litvinenko II. A week after his death, Hermitage’s lawyers wrote to the police detailing their concerns and asking for extensive toxicology tests to be carried out. The police didn’t reply. Another week passed. In frustration, Browder leaked the story to the
Independent
, owned by Alexander Lebedev, the Russian businessman and former KGB intelligence officer who had worked in the 1980s at the Soviet embassy in London.

There were many possible lines of inquiry. Hermitage’s lawyers urged the police to cooperate with the French authorities, and to obtain video surveillance in Paris and from Weybridge. Other avenues to examine included the movements of members of the Klyuyev group (the criminal gang headed by fraudster Dmitry Klyuyev), some of whom had travelled to the UK. There was Perepilichnyy’s possible dispute with Kovtun. And the fact that Eastern European contract killers were still entering the UK with ease.

Seven months earlier, a Moldovan assassin had ambushed another Russian in Canary Wharf in east London. The assassin, Vitalie Proca, had fired six shots into German Gorbuntsov, a 44-year-old Russian banker, as he returned home to his flat in Byng Street. Proca was caught on CCTV, gun raised. Gorbuntsov had fled to Moldova and then the UK after falling out – like Perepilichnyy – with wealthy clients in Moscow. They allegedly included senior figures in Russian Railways and the Solntsevo mafia gang. Gorbuntsov was badly wounded but survived.

The Surrey police investigation into Perepilichnyy’s death continued for some months. Toxicology tests conducted after twenty-two days drew a blank. Two post-mortems failed to uncover a cause of death. In 2013, detectives announced that there was no evidence of ‘third-party involvement’. The case – tragic, but apparently not homicide – was passed on to Surrey’s coroner. Browder was furious. ‘I’m certain he was murdered. The police kicked it into the long grass. This is a travesty of justice,’ he told me.

It wasn’t until spring 2015 that Browder’s suspicions were confirmed, and in quite spectacular fashion. Shortly before his death, Perepilichnyy insured his life for £3.5 million. He took out a flurry of policies. One, with Legal & General, worth £2 million, became active just eight days before he died. The insurer was reluctant to pay out. It asked a plant expert at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, south-west London, Professor Monique Simmonds, to conduct her own tests.

Simmonds was a figure who might have sprung from the pages of Agatha Christie – a distinguished botanist in late middle age, thin, dressed in a severe black trouser suit and with short cropped hair. She had previously been involved in some extraordinary cases. In 2001, the limbless and headless body of a boy had been found floating in the river Thames. Forensic tests at Kew revealed traces of the toxic calabar bean in the lower intestine. The plant trail led to West Africa, where witch doctors use the bean to paralyse their victims. The police concluded the boy – aged five or six – had been ritually murdered.

Simmonds’ latest findings were similarly sensational. They were revealed at a pre-inquest hearing in Woking. She had tested samples taken from the dead man against a range of deadly plants. Perepilichnyy had been poisoned. He was the victim of a twining climber found in scrubby mountain forests.

The poison came from one of five possible varieties of the lethal gelsemium plant. The plant contains gelsemine, a compound similar to strychnine. The plant is a weapon of choice among Chinese and Russian assassins. Simmonds discovered traces of an ion linked to gelsemium in Perepilichnyy’s stomach. The most toxic variety is
Gelsemium elegans
. It grows only in Asia. The poison’s last known victim was Long Liyuan, a Chinese billionaire who died in 2011 after eating cat meat stew believed to have been laced with
Gelsemium elegans.

This was a dramatic development. The focus now was on Perepilichnyy’s last meal. What was it and who was his dining companion? There were clear parallels with
Litvinenko – here, once again, was an apparent reprisal killing of someone with potent enemies in Moscow.

But there were differences, too. Perepilichnyy’s widow Tatiana insisted her husband wasn’t murdered. There was no direct evidence, she said. She accused Hermitage of peddling ‘lazy stereotypes’. Not every Russian exile who dropped dead was the victim of foul play, she added.

The case went on, disputed and unresolved, into 2016. Surrey Police continued to insist Perepilichnyy’s death was wholly ordinary. At the same time, however, it refused to release forty-two documents, on the grounds of national security. Three years on, this was a surprising move. It raised another possibility. Before his murder, had Perepilichnyy talked to Britain’s spy agencies?

In March 2009, the US secretary of state and future presidential candidate Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov with a small green box tied with a ribbon. The venue was Geneva; the mood was warm; there were smiles and handshakes from the American and Russian delegations.

Lavrov opened the box. Inside it was a red button on a yellow background, and the word
peregruzka
. As Lavrov noted with some glee, the word ‘
peregruzka
’ actually means ‘over-charged’. The Obama administration had meant to write
perezagruzka
– the Russian noun for ‘reset’.

The blooper was emblematic of how US know-how on Russia had degraded in the post-Cold War era, as Washington became distracted with international wars (Afghanistan, Iraq); grappled with the hydra-headed
threat after 9/11 of radical Islamist terrorism; and assumed that Russia, its defeated Cold War adversary, was moving slowly towards liberal democracy. It wasn’t. The US State Department still had Russian area specialists, of course. But it appeared that none of them could spell.

During the presidencies of George W. Bush, relations with Moscow sank. Putin supported the US-led war in Afghanistan but opposed Iraq. The Russian president’s list of grievances against Washington grew. Briefly summarised, they included Nato expansion, the US’s putative missile defence programme in Europe, and the pro-western and pro-reform revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, which Putin claimed were an American-inspired plot.

Relations reached a nadir in August 2008, when Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president and a US ally, tried to seize back the rebel province of South Ossetia using military force. Russia responded with a full-scale invasion. It was a brutal lesson in regional geo-politics. And a practical articulation of the Kremlin’s new big power doctrine: that it had ‘privileged interests’ in its post-Soviet back and front yards.

The Obama administration’s decision to ‘reset’ relations with Russia was pragmatic. The goal was not to turn Russia into a progressive law-based state – an unlikely prospect that could only be achieved by Russians themselves – but to secure Moscow’s co-operation on key international challenges. These were Obama’s first-term priorities. They included Iran’s nuclear programme; Afghanistan; the common threat from Al Qaida; and – as the Arab Spring took hold – the disastrous war in Syria.

The White House’s calculus was strategic, though there was an element of wishful thinking too. Between 2008 and 2012, Dmitry Medvedev – an ex-lawyer who grew up in the 1970s and was a fan of the British rock group Deep Purple – was Russia’s titular president. Leaked US diplomatic cables show that the US was keen to treat the liberal-seeming Medvevev as a genuine interlocutor. In reality, it was the hawkish Putin who pulled the strings.

When Browder turned up in Washington it was unsurprising that the state department responded coolly to his plan to punish Magnitsky’s killers. Browder was seeking to use an obscure law passed by President Bush in 2004 that allows the US to impose visa sanctions on corrupt foreign officials. He lobbied senators, journalists and anybody who would listen to him. His aim was to pass into law a Magnitsky act. The act would freeze the assets of those involved in his lawyer’s death.

Browder had found Putin and co.’s Achilles heel. In Soviet times, the politburo lived quite a bit better than the average Soviet citizen. It had special shops and holidays on the Black Sea. In Putin’s Russia, however, the difference was vast. Top bureaucrats, including the Klyuyev gang, were worth millions. They enjoyed international lifestyles. What was the point of stealing all that money if you could only spend it in Sochi, with its scruffy pebbly beach?

In December 2012, weeks after Perepilichnyy’s death, Congress passed a landmark Magnitsky law. It blocked eighteen Russian officials from entering America. Most importantly, the law denied them access to US banking facilities.

The law drew an apoplectic, asymmetric response from Putin. He ended the adoption of Russian babies by American couples. And, in a twist that might have been written by Gogol, the Kremlin put Magnitsky on trial. That he was already dead was apparently not an obstacle. In summer 2013, a judge convicted him of tax evasion, announcing a surreal verdict to an empty barred cage.

Britain’s David Cameron once took a tough stance on the Kremlin. In 2008, as Russian troops overran Georgia, Cameron flew to the capital Tbilisi to show solidarity with Saakashvili. At the time, Cameron was leader of the opposition Conservatives. It was a piece of opportunism that embarrassed the UK’s then prime minister Gordon Brown. Cameron called for Russia’s suspension from the G8 and offered a memorable line: ‘Russian armies can’t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.’

After entering Downing Street in 2010, Cameron’s attitude towards the Russian government softened. Brown had refused to meet with Putin following Litvinenko’s murder. Cameron, by contrast, appeared keen to move on from the polonium episode. Britain still sought the extradition of Lugovoi and Kovtun, of course. But, Cameron indicated, these bilateral differences could be ‘negotiated around’ and shouldn’t prevent cooperation in other areas, especially trade.